"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis
"I don’t believe
in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze

Note on Citations

The numerical citations refer to page number. The source's text-space (including footnote region) is divided into four equal portions, a, b, c, d. If the citation is found in one such section, then for example it would be cited p.15c. If the cited text lies at a boundary, then it would be for example p.16cd. If it spans from one section to another, it is rendered either for example p.15a.d or p.15a-d. If it goes from a 'd' section and/or arrives at an 'a' section, the letters are omitted: p.15-16.

Brain emulation succeeds if merely it replicates human neural functioning. Yet for the authors its success increases when it perfectly replicates one specific person’s brain. She might then survive her body’s death by living the simulation.

This prospect has posthumanist proponents. Their view must presuppose certain traits of human consciousness and selfhood. Hans Moravec for example rejects the body-identity position. This theory holds that the human individual can only be preserved if the continuity of its ‘body stuff’ is maintained. He proposes instead what he terms the pattern-identity theory. It defines the essence of personhood as “the pattern and the process going on in my head and body, not the machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is mere jelly.” (Moravec 117)

Katherine Hayles observes that mental uploading presupposes as well a cybernetic concept. Our selfhood extends into intersubjective systems lying beyond our body’s bounds. (2c) Picasso places himself into a painting. It reflects and communicates his identity to other selves. This could have been more fully accomplished if we precisely simulated his brain processes.

Posthumanists, Hayles claims, hold a view that “privileges information pattern over material instantiation.” So we in no way are bound to our bodies. (2d)

She continues:

the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (3a)

In this way, the patterns of information that constitute our identities just happen right now to be located in a “prosthesis-body.” (Krueger, p.78, commenting on Hayles, p.2 et seq.).

Rather, humans will realize that they are by nature dynamic patterns of information, which can exist in many different material contexts. (211d)

We are patterns. These can be communicated into other embodiments. Computers may attain this capacity. Their emulations would embody us. Then neither we – nor no one – will know the difference. There will be no distinction between our software simulations and our soft embodiments.